According to wikipedia, educational games are games explicitly designed with educational purposes, or which have incidental or secondary educational value. All types of games may be used in an educational environment, however educational games are games that are designed to help people learn about certain subjects, expand concepts, reinforce development, understand a historical event or culture, or assist them in learning a skill as they play.
The international course, Games in Schools, organized by the educational platform europeanschoolnetacademy.eu, brought to the attention of teachers from all over Europe the role of games in school education. After completing this course, in the subject I teach, namely mathematics, I proposed to the students in the lesson Divisibility Rules, to make an application in Scratch in order to fix the acquired notions.
The application itself is attractive to students, has blocks of commands, characters, scenes and in addition is studied in Computer Science classes. Also, Scratch helps children create their own interactive stories, animations, games and music and share them with others. When children do projects in Scratch, they learn important elements of computing, while thinking creatively, systematically and working collaboratively. Here there are some coordinates of the lesson:
Aims of the lesson:
– to identify the divisible numbers from a series of natural numbers
– to use the divisibility criteria
Outcomes of the lesson:
Identify (Knowledge): the divisible numbers with 2, 3, 4, 5, 7
Recognise (Knowledge): numbers that are divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 7
Uncategorised: create a program to verify if a number is divisible by another number
Teaching-Learning activities. Searching on the Internet for a definition of divisibility and the rules that apply. Duration: 3 minutes
Read Watch Listen. Students watch a short video that shows how we determine the divisible numbers: youtube.com/watch?v=Y1pAKJ4rf-M
Practice. Using information found at this link mathsisfun.com/divisibility-rules.html we try to find if a set of number are divisible.
Produce. Based on the information received today students will create in Scratch a program that verifies if a number n is divisible with a number k. This is an example of a solution: scratch.mit.edu/projects/659579662/ . This implementation on the computer was done in a team of 2 students each, thus having the opportunity to collaborate. Those who finished faster had the opportunity to animate the project, to add other characters, to introduce dialogues.
I can say that the combination of using the Internet for documentation, watching video and finally being able to create a program in an application that students really appreciate as Scratch was a unique and enjoyable way for my students to gain new knowledge. and especially to fix them.
References
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_game
digitalkids.ro/despre-scratch/